SoundGuy wrote:We normally camp on electric sites and based on that alone a simple G24 sitting on the tongue would serve the purpose. However, because we lose campsite power for one reason or another at least 2 or 3 times each season I installed a 1000w PSW inverter in the front pass through storage compartment so we can still use a couple of 120 vac fans and make coffee & toast the same way we always do.

pnichols wrote:I clipped the above portion out of your long post above to ask a question: When electric sites at a campground lose power - aren't campers who need to continue with 120V AC power and until the campground power is restored - allowed to use their generators if they have them?

I would think that would be accepted and expected by the campground managers and residents regardless of the temporary noise (and fumes).

For sure, but here in the Ontario provincial parks genset use just doesn't seem to be all that common - thankfully. On this trip illustrated below we were camping over the weekend of Oct 17, 2015 when daytime temps should have been in the high 50s / low 60s F with bright blue skies. Ha - a freak storm blew in from Lake Huron and buried the area with a foot of snow, power went out late Friday night and wasn't restored for 36 hrs. At the time I owned my second Honda EU2000i but where was it? - back in my workshop 'cause I got tired of dragging it around with us all the time but never using it. Now that I think about it I don't recall hearing any gensets running on that trip. I had the inverter installed by this time so was able to use the toaster and coffee maker anyway.

I also built a quiet box for my EU2000i that really dealt with the noise issue quite well but eventually I decided a genset for our purposes was just more trouble than it was worth so I sold it and now just use the inverter to get us through those few instances each season when we may lose shower power. Ideally I would install 2 G31 AGMs but the cost is hard to justify when we only camp without shore power just a few times each season.

pianotuna wrote:For a power pole princess even a tiny utility battery would work.

Not always - lose campsite power and you're running on battery so the more capacity you have the better. How far one wants to go with this though depends on what it's worth to the individual to have more batteries, larger batteries, more capacity, but at greater cost.

Another difference between the 12 volt pair and a six volt series pair

The 6 volt most common in RV service is a GC-2 Golf Car DEEP CYCLE battery

You can safely run it down to half full (50% state of charge) before fast aging sets in.

Though you can get DEEP CYCLE 12 volt if you search hard enough most 12 volt batteries are MARINE/deep cycle these are really starting batteries and shoudl be kept 75-80% full or more. RUn 'em down to 60% and they start "Fast aging"

What is Fast Aging? I see folks replacing batteries 5,4,3 or even newer due to having run them down too far too often.. Mine want 9 7-10 is normal and I've heard of 12.

Home is where I park it.
Kenwood TS-2000 housed in a 2005 Damon Intruder 377

wa8yxm wrote:Though you can get DEEP CYCLE 12 volt if you search hard enough most 12 volt batteries are MARINE/deep cycle these are really starting batteries and shoudl be kept 75-80% full or more. RUn 'em down to 60% and they start "Fast aging"

According to whom? Trojan refers to their Marine / RV Batteries as DEEP CYCLE ... surely you're not suggesting that Trojan doesn't want anyone depleting any of their 12 volt batteries in this series down to just 80%?!

The real issue is cost and availability of TRUE deep discharge 12V batteries. "Dual purpose"/"marine" batteries are a compromise. Any battery that advertises Cold Cranking Amps (CCA) or Marine Cranking Amps (MCA) is NOT a true deep discharge battery. These will have a short life when used in an RV.

The only readily available and reasonably priced deep discharge batteries are 6V golf cart batteries (industry size GC2). You can probably read 100s of posts over the past year where others have said two 6V golf cart are your "best bang for the buck".

FYI - 12V golf cart batteries do exist (size GC12), but are NOT readily available and are $$$ !

Better tell Rolls/Surrette that their batteries which do list CCA are not truly deep cycle.

theoldwizard1 wrote:The real issue is cost and availability of TRUE deep discharge 12V batteries. "Dual purpose"/"marine" batteries are a compromise. Any battery that advertises Cold Cranking Amps (CCA) or Marine Cranking Amps (MCA) is NOT a true deep discharge battery. These will have a short life when used in an RV.

Tom_M wrote:The video is simply a demonstration of Peukert's law. As the rate of discharge increases, the battery's available capacity decreases.

Yep, 6v or 12v shouldn't matter as long as they hold the same number of watt-hours at the same rated discharge and are both deep cycle designs (not labeled but actual design).

12 versus 6 matters if both are sped’d at the same discharge rate because a pair of 12’s will be drawing down at half the rate in the same system. The parallel 12’s will get the 10 percent bonus capacity that the series 6’s won’t. That never seems to come up in the “just add the amp hours” 12 versus 6 comparison threads.

Better tell Rolls/Surrette that their batteries which do list CCA are not truly deep cycle.

theoldwizard1 wrote:The real issue is cost and availability of TRUE deep discharge 12V batteries. "Dual purpose"/"marine" batteries are a compromise. Any battery that advertises Cold Cranking Amps (CCA) or Marine Cranking Amps (MCA) is NOT a true deep discharge battery. These will have a short life when used in an RV.

All batteries have CCA and MCA ratings. They just are not typically advertised for true deep cycle batteries. These ratings are typically associated with starting an engine where you need lots of amps but only for a few seconds.

It's common in boating applications where you are staring a little 20-30hp sailboat engine to use the deep cycle house battery bank to also start the engine as the MCA rating needed is very low compared to a pickup with a 300hp diesel.

It does not harm to use them this way but if you tried to replace your pickup batteries with true deep cycle, you might need 4-6 times the batteries to get enough CCA. This would be very inefficient if you don't need a lot of amp-hr (plus where are you going to install 6 batteries).

Tom_M wrote:The video is simply a demonstration of Peukert's law. As the rate of discharge increases, the battery's available capacity decreases.

Yep, 6v or 12v shouldn't matter as long as they hold the same number of watt-hours at the same rated discharge and are both deep cycle designs (not labeled but actual design).

12 versus 6 matters if both are sped’d at the same discharge rate because a pair of 12’s will be drawing down at half the rate in the same system. The parallel 12’s will get the 10 percent bonus capacity that the series 6’s won’t. That never seems to come up in the “just add the amp hours” 12 versus 6 comparison threads.